Conservation of Time
First thing this morning I sat down to schedule some vacation time for later in the month. Three weeks into the future, I found my schedule was already full of recurring meetings, which led me to write this very satisfying email:
Looking at my calendar, I see that I have 13 hours of recurring meetings each week. This is the baseline, before adding any of the one-time meetings that fill up the rest of my week. This means that before I’ve even entered the office on Monday, greater than 25% of my time has been allocated by automated systems and with no agenda.
I have to wonder what the calendars of our developers and engineers, on whom we rely for any product throughput, looks like? How much time do we spend not developing websites?
Please take a moment to review and reevaluate any reoccurring meetings on your calendar. I would encourage you to delete any that are not absolutely critical or that do not have a clear purpose and agenda.
Please see me if you would like to discuss more efficient or creative ways to foster cross-team communication and increase team efficiency.
Responses have been largely positive. While I do not expect any revolutionary gains in efficiency, I’m hopeful that my little reminder will cause folks to give a bit more thought about our use of time. At least for a day or two.
